I think that literature—essays, stories, poems—is the one form where we can meet, imagination to imagination, without hosts of people in between, no directors and actors and set designers and so on. The medium itself is fairly transparent. You don’t need equipment or electrical outlets. You can go off alone to read, and, if the work is good, you are then intensely close to other human beings.

Here’s more on Ullman and her new novel, which is set in San Francisco. BONUS: Spot the quote from Sean McDonald, my editor at FSG and longtime Friend of Snarkmarket!

I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately — how literature overcomes (or tries to overcome) the deficiencies of language – all those failures of imaginations to connect – WITH language. Like, only the spear that made this wound can heal it. Cf also Mallarmé, “to purify the language of the tribe.”